What a difference a word makes - the (wildly) misleading headline should really read "Boeing CEO *was* paid $33 MN in 2023", but hey, clickbait...More
Boeing CEO paid $33 mn in 2023, gave up bonus over MAX 9 incident
Boeing's CEO received $33 million in compensation for 2023 but declined a potential $2.8 million bonus following the near-catastrophic Alaska Airlines incident in January, the company said Friday in a securities filing.techxplore.com
Nope. That's a mechanic's failure to properly latch the cowling down, NOT A BOEING PROBLEM.
aerossurance.com
www.9news.com.au
Took an awful long time for Boeing/Spirit to respond to this...
thehill.com
www.independent.co.uk
‘This will end with a hole in the ground’: Inside the Boeing catastrophe
‘They were always caught flat-footed by some terrible problem that many people in the workplace knew would happen... And that happened over and over and over and over and over again.’ Io Dodds reports on a corporate nightmare
cheers,
Robin.
Reminds me of Hammond and Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
Hammond was far more honourable and well intentioned (not to mention competent!) than that post-merger lot.
www.bbc.com
No, Yutani was more competent!
www.telegraph.co.uk
airlive.net
I’m not sure if Alaskan Airlines, or even the FAA, fully understands the scope of the American obesity epidemic.Issue with 737 scrapping their tails during takeoff traced back to a software code (from Sweden):
REPORT Two Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 tail strike incidents were caused by a software glitch
A software glitch caused a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide. On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii departing six minutes apart experienced a tail strike. The pilots of each flight felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at...
Without knowledge of the total number of errors versus the total number of correct results, the conditions that led to errors - impossible to say.
How long has the affected software version been in use? I would say the people responsible should thoroughly review their testing procedures.
Most of the airlines have some central office computing the W&B data and sending it to the aircrew. Recently had the experience where we pushed back from the gate, almost got to the runway and got pulled aside so the office could confirm our W&B was good for the flight, after a few minutes we got cleared to go, makes me wonder though if some of the basic airmanship is lost these days. I got my license at 18 and never forgot how to do a W&B and did my fair share of potato diagrams in engineering school. I'm probably just an old fart by now, BTW you kids get off my lawn!!!
www.documentcloud.org
qz.com
The Atlantic on Boeing's decline. The author primarily blames alienation of the executives from the shop floor and outsourcing almost all manufacturing to subcontractors with poor - if any - centralised record keeping or quality control. Boeing is not the only one.
May be paywalled but here's the essence.
The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
[...]
Hart-Smith warned, “it is necessary for the prime contractor to provide on-site quality, supplier-management, and sometimes technical support. If this is not done, the performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.”
[...]
A plane is a complex system in which the malfunction of one piece can produce catastrophic failure of the whole. Assembly must be tightly choreographed. But now—especially with Boeing continually trying to wring costs from its suppliers—there were many more chances for errors to creep in. And when FAA investigators finally toured the premises of Spirit AeroSystems—maker of the blown-out door as well as the fuselage it was supposed to fit in—they did not find a tight operation. They found one door seal being lubricated with Dawn liquid dish soap and cleaned with a wet cheesecloth, and another checked with a hotel-room key card.
Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing
Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?www.theatlantic.com
A significant link to a Casandra's warning in the article:
DocumentCloud
The same problem, I think, is going to be the undoing of many startups, such as in EVOTL where techbros with Powerpoints and AI-generated imagery think they can outsource everything but the 'vibe.'
The problem with the Atlantic article is that the author has a very simplistic view of manufacturing that idealizes the analog past. Engineers used to need to work in proximity to the shop floor because there was a small army of draftsmen drawing plans for a large army of workers. Feeding rolled aluminum and rivets into one end of the factory and rolling completed airplanes out of the other made perfect sense before CAD. And outsourcing has worked perfectly well for Airbus and everyone else. Moving Boeing’s headquarters to Chicago was actually a good idea - getting sales closer to the airline customers. The biggest mistake was probably going with the 737 Max instead of a clean sheet of paper design that would have fixed the center of gravity issues and had a modern composite fuselage that wasn’t built by the cackhanded workforce in Wichita, Kansas. The entire point of offloading that plant to private equity should have been to develop an alternate source of fuselages, not permanently supporting the oldunionized workforce that represented a liability to begin with. Boeing’s historical labor strife has lead to underinvestment and lower and middle level level management that lives in fear of the union bosses. The same thing happened with the Big 3 and the UAW and has never been fully resolved.The Atlantic on Boeing's decline. The author primarily blames alienation of the executives from the shop floor and outsourcing almost all manufacturing to subcontractors with poor - if any - centralised record keeping or quality control. Boeing is not the only one.
May be paywalled but here's the essence.
The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
[...]
Hart-Smith warned, “it is necessary for the prime contractor to provide on-site quality, supplier-management, and sometimes technical support. If this is not done, the performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.”
[...]
A plane is a complex system in which the malfunction of one piece can produce catastrophic failure of the whole. Assembly must be tightly choreographed. But now—especially with Boeing continually trying to wring costs from its suppliers—there were many more chances for errors to creep in. And when FAA investigators finally toured the premises of Spirit AeroSystems—maker of the blown-out door as well as the fuselage it was supposed to fit in—they did not find a tight operation. They found one door seal being lubricated with Dawn liquid dish soap and cleaned with a wet cheesecloth, and another checked with a hotel-room key card.
Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing
Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?
A significant link to a Casandra's warning in the article:
DocumentCloud
The same problem, I think, is going to be the undoing of many startups, such as in EVOTL where techbros with Powerpoints and AI-generated imagery think they can outsource everything but the 'vibe.'
www.seattletimes.com
